


I Am Human

by nagi_schwarz



Series: Foxtrot [68]
Category: First Monday, Stargate Atlantis, The Dollhouse - Fandom
Genre: Dollhouse-level non-con, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-03
Updated: 2016-03-03
Packaged: 2018-05-27 16:39:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6292090
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nagi_schwarz/pseuds/nagi_schwarz
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>For the <a class="i-ljuser-profile" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile"><img class="i-ljuser-userhead"/></a><a class="i-ljuser-username" href="http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/">comment_fic</a> prompt: Any, Any, "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within." Richard Woolsey joins the fight against the Dollhouse and against the IOA when the IOA threatens Atlantis and the Pegasus Galaxy. Minor crossover with First Monday. Set post-series.</p>
    </blockquote>





	I Am Human

**Author's Note:**

> For the [](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/profile)[comment_fic](http://comment-fic.livejournal.com/) prompt: Any, Any, "People are like stained-glass windows. They sparkle and shine when the sun is out, but when the darkness sets in their true beauty is revealed only if there is light from within." Richard Woolsey joins the fight against the Dollhouse and against the IOA when the IOA threatens Atlantis and the Pegasus Galaxy. Minor crossover with First Monday. Set post-series.

Richard hadn't intended to get caught up in the Dollhouse business. Technically it was a civilian issue unrelated to the IOA's purposes, so he should have been shuffled away to another project. But with several key figures related to the Dollhouse prosecution involved in the Stargate program, the IOA was involved whether it liked it or not, because SGC and Atlantis issues were stalled while the US Attorney's office was prosecuting all the high-ranking Rossum employees and corporate backers and clients it had managed to ferret out (with an awful lot of help from the NID and the combined SG-1/AR-1 team).

Richard had intended to stay away from the brouhaha, keep his head down, and wait until the IOA made its final decision on Atlantis so he could ship back out to Pegasus with it. Against all odds, he'd grown fond of the city, could almost think of it as home, and he wanted to stay with it, protect it and its allies if he could.

But then he'd received a memo and an amicus brief from someone whose initials were _JL_ , and he was intrigued. JL had a sharp sense of jurisprudence and was prepared for a vigorous campaign to redefine personhood in the law, anticipating that a smart defense attorney would argue that the actives were not people, the imprints were not people, and the underlying personality had not, in fact, been harmed.

Richard knew that the redefinition of personhood wasn't just critical to the Dollhouse case; it was critical to a matter directly affecting the IOA: whether the Wraith Todd was a person, whether he had rights, and whether the IOA should expend efforts on finding a cure for the Wraith or just a way to exterminate them completely.

So Richard ended up flying all over the country, observing various trials. He took detailed notes on testimony given by former actives, by expert witnesses in psychology, psychiatry, and neuroscience. As an attorney, he was expert at emotionally detaching himself from a legal question. While he was the one bearing the brunt of the argument in front of a judge, it wasn't really his skin in the game. The result had no bearing on him.

Except this time the result did. It had a bearing on him and everyone on Earth and everyone in the Pegasus Galaxy too.

So he watched, and he listened, and he learned.

The first time he watched Foxtrot John Sheppard testify, he was surprised. He hadn't expected to see the man any time soon, and certainly not out of uniform, instead wearing a somber dark suit and a conservative tie. (He hadn't tamed his hair, though.)

Richard was surprised at Sheppard's stillness on the stand; he kept his hands folded neatly in his lap, answered questions as asked, did not speak unless spoken to, and his tone was calm, without his usual sarcasm or cheekiness. He was the picture of perfect posture, instead of his usual slinky, slouchy self, and Richard wondered if he was seeing John Sheppard at all.

After the prosecutor laid foundation for Sheppard's testimony – his introduction to the Dollhouse, how he was familiar with the defendant, some corporate executive who'd backed Rossum's research in exchange for a promise of eternal life, an endless string of young, attractive bodies – he began asking questions about Sheppard's direct contact with the defendant.

Richard had been married, so he wasn't an especially prudish man, and spending his days with marines wandering through the halls – young men with healthy libidos who were far from home and loved ones – had cured him of some of his most missish tendencies. That didn't mean he was prepared for the calm, clinical way in which Sheppard described being drugged and sexually assaulted by the man sitting at the defense table. Of course, the imprint at the time had been a willing participant, ingesting controlled substances, but then the imprint had been programmed to be willing.

The prosecutor was smart, asked about the rest of that imprint's life, and Sheppard recited the life story of a young man who grew up in a normal suburban home, intact family, liked acting at school, and took off for LA with hopes of making it big and was lured into a 'casting couch' scheme by the defendant. The jury ate it up as the prosecutor elicited details about the imprint's childhood, school years, time in LA.

The defense attorney took precisely the tack JL had predicted, accused Sheppard of being something sub-human, like a fancy computer program or software, some kind of corrupt data file.

"How do we know you're even human?"

"If you cut me, do I not bleed?"

"Answer the question."

"The same way anyone on the jury knows you're human," Sheppard said. "You look like a human. You act like a human. You sound like a human. Well, as human as any lawyer can be –"

There it was, the vaunted Sheppard charm.

Several jurors - female, older - smiled.

"So absent some indication that I'm mostly robot, I am human."

The defense attorney glowered at him. "You just testified that you have these other things inside of you – imprints."

"People," Sheppard said quietly. "They're people."

"But they were created in a computer."

"Not all of them."

"If they were created in a computer, they're not real people." The defense attorney lifted his chin in challenge.

"Personalities are created in computers. We just happen to call those organic computers brains."

Richard had never been much for trial advocacy, preferred the appellate side of things, but even he knew the defense attorney had lost control of Sheppard and that Sheppard had control of the jury.

That didn't stop the lawyer from tearing into Sheppard, words cold and precise, about how he'd signed his life away willingly, that he'd been an active participant in the crime, his imprint accepting the drugs and consenting to the deviant sexual behavior, that by submitting to the Dollhouse Sheppard had ceased being human.

And because Sheppard was so calm, so steady, unflinching in the face of the razor-sharp questions, the jury started to believe the defense attorney, began to see sense where they should have seen horror. Richard could feel the warmth seeping out of the room. Was it just his imagination, or had the room dimmed, its shadows lengthened? His grip on the back of the bench in front of him went white-knuckled.

Where Sheppard was a soldier, Richard was a lawyer, and he'd trained to use words as tools, as weapons when needs be, and he could only watch, helpless, as the defense attorney parted flesh and muscle and ligaments and cut Sheppard down to the very bone with question after question after question.

When Sheppard admitted that no, none of the imprints had biological parents, none of them had been born, none of them had their own bodies, they were just a collection of carefully-arranged electrical impulses that were programmed into his brain, that he could switch them on at will and be anyone, anything, the prosecutor's expression was carefully blank.

Richard knew what defeat looked like on a seasoned litigator.

He also knew when a seasoned litigator took something too far.

"You're not even really alive, are you?"

"If you really believe that," Sheppard said, "and you expect the jury to believe that, why don't you take the deputy's gun and shoot me? Because if I'm not alive, I can't die, and you won't be guilty of murder for having shot me."

The defense attorney hesitated.

That was the spark.

Realization dawned on the jurors' faces. Richard felt warmth suffuse the room, turn to heat as the tension ratcheted up several notches. For all the theory the defense attorney had spouted, for all the damning admissions Sheppard had been forced to make, he was still a person. Still human.

Alive.

Richard had the sense that something beautiful had just been born. He watched it play out again and again in courtrooms across the country, watched the prosecutor learn and adapt, allow Sheppard to be himself but also allow the imprints to testify on their own behalf. Richard learned about Songwriter struggling to make ends meet, hungry and half-homeless on the streets of LA while he sold his music and eventually his body for warmth and a meal to a kind, fun-loving woman who turned out to be the CEO of a company that was partnered with Rossum and had engineered the computer system used to make a server farm out of human beings in the infamous Dollhouse 'attic'. A jury half fell in love with the painfully shy physicist who was partially based on Dr. McKay and had had only a pet raccoon for company while he solved a very difficult problem for a company that worked with Rossum and ended up using his work to create denser active architecture, able to take twice as many imprints.

One by one, the courts fell in line, finding that imprints were people, that the definition of personhood was not limited to humans, and that the Rossum employees and customers who'd taken advantage of hundreds of men and women over the years could be punished for what they'd done.

Sheppard was on the road testifying for six months before he returned to the SGC. Richard returned sooner, ready to tackle the problem of the IOA and its refusal to grant anyone access to Todd the Wraith so as to continue working on the drug that would allow Wraith to eat like humans. Todd, the IOA argued, was not a person, and therefore was not considered a prisoner of war or enemy combatant or anything else that would provide him with basic personhood rights.

As he worked and corresponded with JL, crafting his argument out of some of Sheppard's testimony, court decisions, and existing laws and policies, Richard felt like a masterpiece was coming together under his hands. When Richard went to schedule oral argument in front of the Supreme Court, attorneys from all over the country clamored to be his second chair, not just for the chance to argue in front of the Supreme Court but for the chance to be part of the making of an historical decision.

The SGC nominated Julian Lodge to be second chair. The name was immediately familiar, because Richard recognized the initials. So this was the famous JL. Richard was pretty sure he'd heard the name somewhere else, but he wasn't too bothered with digging up the details, because Lodge was a brilliant logician and together they could defeat anything the IOA's second-tier attorney could come up with (and this meant Richard would be working for the SGC directly instead of the IOA, and he was surprisingly okay with that, even if it meant not going back to Atlantis, because this decision would affect the fate of two galaxies).

When the day finally arrived, General O'Neill was kind enough to send a military escort for Richard so he could avoid the worst of the media vultures on the steps of the courthouse. Lorne, Cadman, Teldy, Vega, and Mehra kept close to him as they pushed through the crowd, Teldy in front, Lorne bringing up the rear, shielding him from the yelling and the questions and the cameras.

Richard paused inside the doors to take a breath, then went to find a water fountain for a drink. As experienced an orator as he was, his mouth always went dry before oral argument, and he liked to use the complimentary glass of water as a stall tactic rather than as a necessity during questioning.

Then he gathered with the other attorneys waiting to be heard in front of the highest court in the land.

"Major," he said to Teldy, "have you seen my second chair?"

Richard supposed he shouldn't have been surprised when Sheppard, wearing a three-piece suit and a charming little bow tie and carrying a leather briefcase that looked well-cared for but well-used stepped out of the crowd and offered a hand.

"Good morning, Mr. Woolsey. Julian Lodge. So glad to finally meet you." There was just the tiniest hint of Sheppard in the man's smile, and the last sliver of the masterpiece fell into place.


End file.
